Max nine concert

Max Neunzert (born August 29, 1892 in Winhöring , † 1982 in Bad Reichenhall ) was a German political activist. He became known for his involvement in various female murders in the 1920s and for his role in the 1923 Hitler coup .

Life and activity

Early life and World War I (1892-1918)

Neunzert was the son of a chief forester. From 1902 the father was in the service of Count Ernst von Moy in Salzburg as chief forester. In his youth, Neunzer, like his father, aspired to a career as an estate manager and district forester.

Neunzert attended secondary school in Wasserburg, which he graduated in 1911. He then worked in agriculture. In 1912 Neunzert registered as a one-year-old volunteer with the Bavarian military, from which he was released in 1913 for health reasons as a replacement reserve.

After graduating from the Agricultural Academy in Weihenstephan , Neunzert began studying in the agricultural department of the Technical University in Munich in 1914 . A few weeks after the beginning of World War I , he volunteered for the Bavarian army in September 1914 . He then took part in the war from 1914 to 1918.

In the initial phase of the war, Neunzert did service in the machine gun company of the 1st Jäger Battalion , which was deployed on various front lines. In June 1916 he suffered bruises from a grenade shot near Verdun and was buried a few hours later in a grenade attack. As a result of this experience, Neunzert suffered a nervous shock and was temporarily discharged from military service. After his reactivation he was mainly used in machine gun departments of the air defense. Shortly before the end of the war, he was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve.

Activity in the Munich Rescue Service and involvement in female murders (1919 to 1923)

During the civil war-like conditions of 1919, Neunzert participated as a member of a volunteer corps in the suppression of the council system established in parts of Bavaria in the spring of 1919. So he took part in the conquest of various Upper Bavarian cities by the counter-revolutionary forces.

In the summer of 1919 Neunzert was assigned to the 41st rifle regiment of the Epp Brigade as a temporary volunteer . From March to June 1920 he was then employed by the intelligence service of the Reichswehr Group Command in Munich.

Neunzert organized himself politically in the NSDAP , which he joined for the first time in May 1920. He had already met Adolf Hitler in 1919.

Since the summer of 1920, Neunzert had been working without a permanent position at the economic office of the regional management of the Munich Rescue Service. At the same time he was available to the Reichswehr captain Ernst Röhm . As a leading officer in the Munich military district command , Röhm undertook to supervise the right-wing extremist secret organizations in Munich, to provide them with weapons and financial means and to largely direct their activities from the background. From May to August 1921, Neunzert held a permanent and full-time position with the resident army when it was disarmed. He was then from August 1921 to May 1923 a contract employee of the military district command.

In the Rescue Service, Neunzert's main task was to clear the secret arsenals of the right-wing extremists, who were endangered by the Entente , by moving the weapons to safe locations. The main concern here was that the weapons stocks of the "patriotic" forces in Germany were, in secret, much larger than the peace treaties with the victorious powers of the First World War allowed. Therefore, these weapons should be carefully hidden from the inspectors of the victorious powers who monitored compliance with the disarmament obligations in Germany.

In this context, a further important task of Neunzert and some other members of the resident armed forces was to identify actual or alleged “traitors” in their own ranks or third parties who had learned of weapons stashes and who were feared that they would be the Allied inspectors or the authorities inform about these illegal weapons stocks. This mostly happened through the liquidation of such persons in the context of so-called femicide.

Neunzert was suspected of having been involved in at least three female murders of people who the right-wing extremists considered traitors in 1920 and 1921: During the failed female murder of the former soldier Dobner, Neunzert drove the car in which Hermann Berchtold and Schuster were driving tried to kill him by strangling . Dobner escaped, however, by throwing himself out of the moving car and fled. Neunzert was also the driver of the truck to Ulm, which was linked to the murder of Hans Hartung in August 1921. The police also suspected him of driving the car in which the maid Maria Sandmayr was murdered in 1920. Despite a dubious alibi, it could not be proven that he was involved in the Sandmayr murder.

In his work for Röhm and the resident army, Neunzert maintained close contacts with the Munich police department , in particular with the police chief Ernst Pöhner and the head of the political department, Wilhelm Frick .

At the end of 1920, Neunzert passed his diploma examination for farmers as well as the examination for agricultural teaching.

Activity in the "Kampfbund" and involvement in the Hitler putsch (1923)

From May to November 1923, Neunzert belonged to the top management of the "Kampfbund", an organization founded by the NSDAP and several national armed forces associations ( Reich War Flag , Bund Oberland ), in which the paramilitary forces of the associations working together were united in order to achieve a concentration of to achieve greater strength for smaller individual organizations in order to improve the prospect of achieving the common goals. Neunzert was on the staff of the military leader of the Kampfbund Hermann Kriebel and took over the management of the intelligence department of the Kampfbund as a consultant for espionage and treason.

In November 1923 Neunzert took part in a prominent position in the Hitler putsch in Munich: On the night of November 8th to 9th, 1923 the Kampfbund, which acted as the military sponsor of the putsch, occupied large parts of the city, in which Neunzert was also involved. During the night he was sent to the police headquarters to inform Wilhelm Frick of his appointment as Munich police president by the putschist government and to instruct the latter to bring the presidium under his control.

When it became clear in the early morning of November 9, 1923 that the government of the Bavarian State Commissioner General Gustav von Kahr , who had briefly signaled that he wanted to join the putsch undertaking, was preparing to put down the putsch, nine concert was at 7:30 a.m. Sent in the morning by Hitler with the order near Berchtesgaden to visit the former Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht and to ask him in his, Hitler's, name to act as mediator between the leadership of the putschists and the Bavarian government. Hitler's mandate was that Neunzert and the Crown Prince should prevent "nationalists from shooting at nationalists". The operation failed because the coup was put down by the police before Neunzert could return to Munich due to the shooting that took place during the march of a large number of the coup participants to the Feldherrenhalle in the midday of November 9 on Odeonsplatz.

Neunzert reached the Crown Prince Rupprecht in Berchtesgaden around the same hour as the coup in Munich was shot down. Since he knew nothing about this for the time being, we had an hour and a half friendly conversation with the aspirant on the vacant Bavarian throne. As a political model for the government of the empire, Neunzert had the idea of ​​setting up a "royal dictatorship" in Germany for the time being, as had been established in Italy, Spain and Hungary in previous years. Hitler was supposed to act as chancellor of a royal dictator Rupprecht.

On the way back to Munich, Neunzert learned of the failure of the coup. Nevertheless, he continued the journey and reached the main train station in the evening around 9:30 p.m.

A few days later, Neunzert fled across the border to Austria, where he stayed as a political refugee in Innsbruck, Salzburg and other places in the following months.

Activities from 1924 to 1929

A preliminary investigation initiated against Neunzert in connection with his involvement in the Hitler putsch was closed by the Munich public prosecutor's office as part of the Hitler trial. This was justified by the fact that it could not be proven that Neunzert had been privy to the coup plan and that his activities were of so minor importance that it could not be proven that he was aware of the situation through his activity of the treasonous Support Hitler's company. In research, it is assumed that the judiciary, through this generous off-the-hook let Neunzert, tried to draw the former Bavarian crown prince, who was still highly revered by most Bavarian public servants (including the judges and public prosecutors), into Hitler Process involved.

In July 1924, however, an arrest warrant was issued against Neunzert because he was accused of driving the car in which Maria Sandmayr was murdered in 1920.

In March 1925 a trial was carried out against Neunzert and others for the murder of Hartung carried out on the night of March 3 and 4, 1921. Neunzert and his colleagues were acquitted.

After the re-establishment of the NSDAP in 1925, Neunzert gradually took an increasingly distant stance towards the party: the personality cult around Adolf Hitler that was developing at that time repelled him, and he also recognized more and more clearly that the political line that the party leadership was now following , was incompatible with his monarchist beliefs. He also disliked the party's transformation from a movement to a traditional political party with a bureaucratic apparatus and structural constriction.

Despite personal concerns, Neunzert rejoined the NSDAP at the beginning of April 1928 (membership number 84.006). The background was an agreement with the Bavarian Prime Minister Heinrich Held , with whose consent Neunzert wanted to infiltrate the NSDAP. In the Bavarian state election in 1928 he was then nominated by the party as a candidate for the southern districts of Upper Bavaria. With 7,596 votes, however, he narrowly missed entry into parliament.

Activity as a military advisor in China (1929 to 1930)

After the failure of his attempt to become a member of the state parliament, Neunzert, who was also in a difficult financial situation, accepted an offer from his old superior Kriebels in 1928 to go to China with him as a military advisor to the Chinese national government . While Kriebel acted as the commander of a guard unit of the Chinese government, Neunzert took over the post from its adjutant.

During his time in China, Neunzer kept constant contact with Germany. So he corresponded u. a. regularly with Heinrich Himmler , whom he probably knew from studying together and who had meanwhile become an important party functionary of the NSDAP. While Himmler asked Neunzert to look for financial supporters for the SS, Neunzert asked them to get him a good place on the list for the Bavarian state elections in 1931.

A friend from China's nineties described him at that time, despite his skeptical attitude towards the party organization of the NSDAP, as an "enthusiastic supporter of Hitler, whom he considered to be the blessing of the world".

Opposition to National Socialism (1931 to 1933)

After his return to Germany, Neunzert quickly and dramatically turned away from both Hitler and the NSDAP. He was disgusted by the personality cult that had been driven around Hitler in the meantime , as he saw in this one betrayal of the party ideals as he understood them. Neunzert also lamented the depersonalization of the NSDAP party apparatus, which, in his opinion, has since resembled the soulless mechanics of the Soviet state ( "In Russia they say collective. Here the same thing only different people and different colors. There are only numbers and everything ducks before the, Leader '. Pooh devil. " ). Above all, he was a thorn in the side of the mendacity and the moral decline that would spread in the NSDAP.

In the spring of 1931, Neunzert officially resigned from the NSDAP. In the declaration of resignation, he justified this step by stating that "after the moral swamp and corruption in the party had become so rampant", he could no longer belong to it as a decent person as a member, so that he would withdraw .

By autumn 1932 at the latest, Neunzert had finally broken with Hitler as a person. The leader principle and the elevation of the nineties to the Messiah repelled him. In a private letter from that year, he went harshly to court with his former leader:

"I cannot recognize any person as a leader who lacks the qualities, both spiritual and moral, who has cultivated an unhealthy Byzantinism, for whom ambition and pathological vanity take precedence and who has become megalomaniac in the exaggerated cult of the leader."

The Straßer Crisis of December 1932, when the de facto General Secretary of the NSDAP, Gregor Straßer, resigned from all his party offices and broke with Hitler, disappointed with Hitler's politics and political strategy, was greeted with joy by Neunzert. Strasser's departure appeared to him to be a phenomenon that was only logical in view of the moral degeneration of the Nazi movement since the "good" times in the early 1920s. Because:

“How can you keep a man [Strasser] in motion who is clean, in every way? It's always like this in life. Criminals cannot tolerate decent people among themselves, because otherwise they are hindered in their criminal activity. "

In contrast to Strasser, Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Röhm identified Neunzert as "criminals" ("They are all criminals!"). As a result, in January 1933 he wrote an open letter to Hitler, who was about to be appointed head of government. In this document, which is rich in personal attacks, Neunzert announces to Hitler that he, Neunzert, now stands in unconditional opposition to him and will fight him with all his might in the future.

Neunzert assumed that Hitler had character deficits and even homosexuality:

“Either you are morally depraved, or, as has often been heard, you are homosexual yourself. [...] The fact that you are a sadist should have been known in party circles for a long time. Unfortunately only very few people know that you belong to the most disgusting kind of this species. As a decent person, however, I feel that it is impossible to make your sexual activity known to the general public. It would redden my face and I would be ashamed of you. I find it completely understandable that you feel comfortable in the brown swamp. The German people may congratulate themselves when they get you as their Führer. You will have orgies on his back that will make him lose sight and hearing. "

Neunzert's vision was to gather what he saw as "good" elements of the political right in a new movement that would be free from the mistakes of the National Socialists.

At the turn of the year 1932/1933 he tried to get in contact with the incumbent Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher in order to convince him to give financial support to the anti-organization he had planned to the NSDAP. He saw his modal goal in dissuading Schleicher from the "delusional idea" of viewing the NSDAP as a national organization.

Nazi period until World War II

Soon after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Neunzert and his second wife moved to Portuguese East Africa . Due to an illness of his wife, however, both returned to Europe after a short time, where they now settled in Austria.

In 1935 Neunzert acquired a mountain estate on Lake Ossiach in Carinthia . From Austria he continued his campaign against National Socialism.

In Germany he was meanwhile considered persona non grata . On the Nazi Party Rally of 1937, his former boss blackflies even expressed that Neunzert after a German invasion of Austria was one of the first that would "hang".

The German annexation of Austria then went comparatively lightly for Neunzert. He was arrested but not killed. From April to September 1938 he was interned in the Wittelsbacher Palais in Munich under the code name "Max Keck". He was then placed under house arrest on his estate.

At the end of 1938, Neunzert was drafted into military service as a former officer and assigned to the 10th Army . Due to the danger to the state, however, he was soon released again because of unworthiness for military service.

In 1940 Neunzert fled to Switzerland via Liechtenstein . He claimed that his arrest was imminent and that an order for his transfer to the Dachau concentration camp was already in place . It can be proven that his property in Austria was requisitioned after his escape.

Second World War

During the Second World War, Neunzert came into contact with representatives of the British and American intelligence services in Switzerland from autumn 1940. They valued him as a valuable source of information about Germany and the leadership of the Nazi movement.

Nineteen political ideas and the plans that he proposed to them were received with skepticism by the representatives of the Anglo-Saxon powers. His biographer Seidel came to the conclusion that his undertakings during the war years showed a considerable loss of reality: Neunzert presented himself to his contacts as an exponent of a large anti-Hitler frond in Germany with several 100,000 members who, if you reached an agreement, mobilized in consultation with the Allies against the ruling regime. He also developed the idea of ​​forming a government against the Nazi government in Berlin, which should be under the auspices of a monarch from the Wittelsbach family . After the liberation of the empire, he even wanted to put the German imperial crown on the heads of the Wittelsbachers.

Letters also belong in this context, such as a letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt , in which he admonished him to enter the war, and a letter to the Finnish government in which he warned it not to join forces with the Nazi state. In line with this, there was no response to Neunzert's offers to travel to the United States or London to discuss plans he had drawn up to bring about the overthrow of the Nazi state. At the same time, efforts made by Neunzert to bring about a restitution of the Wittelsbach monarchy were also unsuccessful. Letters from him to the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht and his son, which should serve to prepare appropriate measures, came back or went unanswered.

The political vision that Neunzert wanted to implement in London and Washington was to merge Bavaria and Austria into a large southern German state in order to create a new German state in the future (either as an independent state or as a part of a larger German federal state) create that would be large and strong enough to act as a counterweight to Prussia, which in the past was overpowering within the German Empire due to its size, population and economic power. In this way, Neunzert argued, peace in Europe would be permanently secured.

In April 1942, Neunzert was finally arrested by the Swiss authorities, who were concerned about his activity. He was interned in Zurich for three months and then spent six months in the Les Vernes / Bellechassee internment camp . He was then assigned to a remote mountain village as a forced residence.

In the post-war period, Neunzert continued to attract attention as an eccentric, who wrote letters with enormous overconfidence to leading Western Allied personalities like a politician of equal rank: In December 1945, for example, he wrote a letter to the British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin , in which he supported the proposal for a state reorganization of the Bavarian Which resulted in the establishment of an independent state of Bavaria with a restoration of the monarchy. In later years the High Commissioner McCloy and Dwight Eisenhower received similar letters from Neunzert.

Role during the Berlin crisis of 1948

During the Berlin crisis of 1948, when the Red Army cut West Berlin off from the outside world by land by subjecting the city to a military blockade , the possibility of a new war seemed for a few weeks - this time between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, the USA ; Great Britain and France - to stand in the space. Since the Bavarian state government under Ehrhard feared the invasion of Soviet troops in Bavaria in this case, they drafted the plan to establish a Bavarian government in exile in Spain after a Soviet invasion of Bavaria , which would work from there to regain the freedom of their homeland. In order to take precautions for this scenario, it was decided to send an emissary to Spain to negotiate with the Spanish government about the admission of a refugee Bavarian government. The choice of the person of the emissary finally fell on nine concert.

In August 1948 Neunzert traveled through Austria to Bern, where he made contact with the representative of the Spanish government there, Luis Chalderon, and submitted the Bavarian government's request that 70 to 100 members of the Bavarian government should move west in the event of a Soviet advance Munich to be evacuated to Madrid in order to set up a Bavarian government in exile there. In addition, the collection of paintings in the Pinakothek was to be brought to Spain as a state treasure. At the end of September 1948, the Spanish government's approval of the Bavarian plan was sent to Bern from Madrid. The further course of events due to the gradual subsidence of the Berlin crisis and the associated moving into the distance to the possibility of a violent escalation of the conflicts between the great powers in Central Europe finally made the negotiations at the end of 1948 irrelevant.

Last years

An application for compensation from Neunzert was finally rejected by the responsible compensation office in September 1955. This was justified with his membership of the NSDAP since 1928, through which he had encouraged National Socialism by strengthening its membership. A lawsuit against the rejection notice brought him a moral victory after all, as the court recognized him as a resistance fighter .

In 1954 Neunzert moved to the United States, where he worked as a cattle farmer in Montana , in a sawmill, as a night porter and as a designer of wallpaper designs in New York. From the USA he continued his efforts to gain recognition as a resistance fighter and for material compensation, for which purpose he regularly traveled to Switzerland and Austria.

In 1970 and 1978 Neunzert ran twice unsuccessfully for a seat in the Bavarian state parliament .

family

In August 1921 Neunzert married a daughter of the landowner Leo Czermak on his estate in Ising near Traunstein. The father-in-law was district leader of the Federation of Bavaria and Reich. The marriage resulted in two sons. Neunzert's brother-in-law was the pilot Johann Czermak .

literature

• Ulrike Claudia Hofmann: "Traitors fall for the distance!": Fememicide in Bavaria in the twenties , 2002.
• Carlos Collado Seidel : "On a secret mission for Hitler and the Bavarian state government. The political adventurer Max Neunzert between Fememorden, Hitler's Putsch and Berlin crisis" in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschicht 50 vol. (2002), pp. 201-236.

Web links

• The Czermak defense feud and its background. A Chiemgau political thriller from 1923 - Part II in: Traunsteiner Tagblatt from February 25, 2014